There are a variety of industries and care facilities including hospitals and manufacturers of pharmaceutical and computer chips which require automatic garment or material dispensing systems. Specifically, they require an automatic dispensing system which permits an authorized user to obtain clean garments, as well as monitoring the dissemination of such garments, and which exchange soiled garments therefor.
To illustrate, hospitals generally require that doctors, nurses and assistants wear garments and scrub suits meeting specific cleanliness requirements. These requirements may dictate that the garments be changed and/or washed a number of times in the course of a 24 hour period. In addition, certain manufacturing industries also require garment specifications, particularly in the manufacture of pharmaceutical and computer chips. A particular clean room, for example, may require garments be cleaned to remove particles of 50, 100 or even 200 microns. These requirements present inventory control concerns in that first, specific garments must be issued to specific users and second, that a user can only enter a clean room once he has checked out the appropriate garment.
Traditionally, garments were simply folded and placed on laundry carts accessible to various users; or the carts were transported to an area, for example an operating room, locker room or scrub room, where the user could readily acquire a clean (or new) garment and discard the old garment. Such inventory control systems relied on an honor system which has proven unreliable in that some users often take multiple clean garments and fail to return the used or soiled garment; this results in economic hardships for the facility. Experience has shown that, on the average for every 100 sets of issued scrub wear, only 95 are returned constituting an approximate 5% daily loss in scrub wear garments or an annual loss for some institutions exceeding $100,000.00.
Since many facilities must have an inventory system but cannot justify the costs associated with honor systems, there is a need for a more controllable system. The system must be capable of issuing a specific garment to a specific user, monitoring if that particular user returns the garment either prior to picking up a clean garment or by a specific time designated by the system and, where different garments are required for different areas, that the user has checked out the appropriate garment prior to entering a controlled area.
Complicating the situation even further is that many hospitals (or other facilities) have often encountered growth rates ahead of their anticipated growth at the time of construction. It therefore becomes exceedingly difficult to designate appropriate and sufficient space to maintain a garment distribution system or center at a convenient location. Hence, it becomes important to have garment inventory control systems compact, convenient, easy to operate and inexpensive to maintain, load and relocate.
Automated inventory control systems are available in the industry. These systems dispense clean garments to authorized users who have been issued magnetic cards, or tokens, identifying these users to a dispensing machine as being authorized to receive one or more garments. These systems are most applicable in hospitals, wherein large quantities of scrub wear are routinely used and returned by hospital personnel for an exchange of clean scrub wear. However, such systems have generally been large, expensive and difficult to relocate.
Inventory control of scrub wear is further complicated by the fact that often garments cannot be marked to personalize them to individual users or, in some cases, the same hospital. Frequently, a hospital's central laundry vendor merely returns similar but not the same scrub wear.
Thus, any improvement in automatic inventory control systems which automatically dispense reusable garments, must necessarily efficiently process and credit the user for garments dispensed and returned without complete reliance on indicia-indicating tags or optically-read information on garments which deteriorates over the useful life of the garment.